Valor and Justice Quartermasters
The latest beta patch added items to the Valor and Justice Quartermasters found in Niuzao Temple in Townlong Steppes. There appear to be a few items that don't require reputation and one item that costs Valor Points and should cost Justice Points; these are likely just bugs.

Keep in mind that heroic dungeon loot is still ilvl 463, so all of the Justice Points gear is lower quality than what you can find in a heroic dungeon.

With the upcoming release of Mists of Pandaria, the Scroll of Resurrection will be receiving several updates to its functionality and availability. The following changes and restrictions will be made as of the release of patch 5.0.4.

The leveling system has been updated to work with the revised specialization and talent system.

Characters will no longer have their talents pre-selected for them, but a specialization is still available to be chosen prior to entering the game.

Monks will be ineligible to receive a Scroll of Resurrection invitation.

Pandaren who have not chosen a faction will be ineligible to receive a Scroll of Resurrection invitation.

To learn more about the Scroll of Resurrection, visit the support site and read the FAQ.

Vengeance is intended to let tanks generate additional damage and threat as content levels rise, despite not gearing for it (or at least not primarily). We're changing the design to let Vengeance play better with active mitigation, but the new design has some other advantages many of you will like.

As most all of you know by now, the idea of active mitigation is that the buttons a tank presses directly contribute to mitigation and survival. In some cases, this is timing-centric, such as Death Strike. In others, it’s both timing-centric and also involves balancing how you spend your resources among multiple abilities, such as Savage Defense vs. Frenzied Regeneration or Shield Block vs. Shield Barrier. In the latter case, it’s important that both abilities are compelling and compete well with each other. We are changing Vengeance to let those abilities be balanced.

I'm going to use Savage Defense (a short duration large dodge buff) and Frenzied Regen (a large instant heal) as examples. Getting the balance between SD and FR right is challenging. We want SD to win on average, but you’re limited on how often you can use it, and it’s not necessarily reliable -- sometimes you really need a heal NOW, and so FR is the right button. SD should win, but FR shouldn’t be too far behind, and they should scale similarly.

SD scales with the incoming damage: if BossA hits you for 60k, and BossB hits you for 120k, then SD is twice as valuable (in absolute terms) on BossB than on BossA. FR scales with your attack power: even a few 5man trash mobs will cap out your Vengeance, so your AP will be the same on BossA as on BossB. FR isn’t any stronger on BossB than BossA.

On top of that, AP and boss damage scales differently as ilevel rises. We tried a solution to that problem where FR scaled exponentially with AP in the last build. That has worked fairly well, but still failed at keeping SD and FR balanced when boss damage was significantly different from the baseline we used as a tuning point. For example, 25-player raid bosses hit twice as hard as 10-player raid bosses, which makes SD twice as valuable.

But wasn’t this post supposed to be about Vengeance? Currently, Vengeance increases your AP by 5% of the damage taken, stacking up to the cap, which happens quickly. We are changing Vengeance to increase AP equal to 5% of the damage you take for 20 sec. This buff will "roll" so that as it gets refreshed the unused part is added to the new buff, similar to how Ignite or Stagger work. The net result will be that Vengeance stacks by the amount of DPS being thrown at you over 20 sec. There is no cap.

Additional nuances:

Avoidance will not count against you. Avoiding an attack will extend the current Vengeance stack back to 20 sec (as if you were hit again for the same DPS).

Blocks, absorbs, Stagger and Shield of the Righteous will also not count against you. The damage before these effects is used for the Vengeance calculation.

To reduce ramp up time, we bump you up to halfway to whatever your average Vengeance level would be based on each individual hit. Essentially, we skip the first 10 sec of ramping.

Tank damage in 5-player groups will decrease. We think this is a good chance because it is weird and demoralizing when tanks consistently top damage meters in dungeons.

Tank damage in 25-player groups will increase. We think this is a good change because it makes tank DPS as relevant in 25-player raids as it is in 10-player raids.

With this change, Brewmaster damage will be extremely overpowered. We will fix it, but you may get a build where they are ludicrously good.

The rest of this post is nitty gritty details for theorycrafters. You do NOT need to read or understand this in order to effectively play a tank.

Whenever you get hit, Vengeance is added based on the damage of the hit before block, crit block, absorbs, stagger, and Shield of the Righteous.

Whenever you avoid an attack from a mob where MobLevel>=TankLevel-3, your existing Vengeance is extended to 20sec remaining.

Based on how hard you’re hit, we estimate how high Vengeance’s equilibrium point will be: DamageTaken / 1.5.

If you’re not at least half that high on Vengeance, we bump you up to that amount

Yes, these do mean that it uses your AP without base AP from Str/Agi (but does still slightly include AP from Agi/Str when you’ve got the 10% AP raid buff or other +%AP buffs).

Please feel free to ask any questions you have about the mechanical details of this.

What would you 'expect' a prot warriors vengenace to be sitting around whilst tanking.. Oh let's say Two of the Three stone guards in a 10 player raid. Hypothetical situation, I've been tanking them for 20 seconds. Would you expect it be higher than our current vengeance cap? Or lower? Or approximately the same?
We just tried this out, and get roughly 25K AP from gear, and 40K AP from Vengeance in this situation as a Protection Warrior in 489 gear. That should be roughly similar to what you currently get. As we noted, it will be higher in 25-player raids.

I don't follow. The tank in question should be taking at least 50k damage per second if he's tanking one boss, and 100k per second if he's tanking two of them (Rend Flesh). That's not counting the melee autoattacks, the possible abilities, etc.

I was assuming that (roughly), the new vengeance plateau was something along the lines of the damage per second the tank wasreceiving. We could also say it as MeleeSwing/Swing Timer. I've been working on some values assuming this, but maybe I'm wrong then?
Our test wasn't rigorous because we just dumped the bosses into a test scenario. In the actual encounter they would use Rend Flesh and other abilities. Looking at the actual encounter with all of their abilities, the tank in question has 24660 AP and an additional 68450 AP from Vengeance. You might take a little more damage if you stood in the pools a lot. Fundamentally, the mechanic should be that it approaches an equilibrium of your damage taken per second as AP.

They have already talked about this and their stance is tanks don't get Vengeance from Players. They also said tanks are viable in PVP as flag carriers and defenders as long as their DPS is not the same or higher than a DPSer. Healer DPS will also be lower than Tanks if they chose to DPS as a healer.
This remains our design even with the new Vengeance model.

Just a quick clarification - what about passives like Blood Presence, defensive cooldowns etc? Or is this list exhaustive?
For now, this list is exhaustive. We’re keeping an eye on this; we almost certainly wouldn’t put passive effects on this list, but will consider defensive cooldowns. We opted not to include them for now.

In terms of unlimited target AOE heals like Divine Star, Halo, Sanctuary, Holy Radiance, Healing Rain, Healing Mushrooms, how do you calculate the fall off in stacked situations? Divine Star for example has an average base heal of 3369 and a scaling factor of 32.5% SP.
Is this the figure for upto 6 targets? When there is a 7th target, does the base heal go down, the scaling factor, or a bit of both?
If so by how much? If it goes down by say, 10% on both the base and the scaling factor, will that same reduction occur for each extra person?

In terms of Divine Star in particular. As it runs out and then returns to you, does its target of 6 still apply? Or would it be a base target of 12 (hit same people out and on its return) before it gets diminishing AOE cap returns? Basically, what is the diminishing returns formula for each of the uncapped AOE heals?
AoE heals that hit more than 6 targets have their total healing multiplied by (6/TargetCount). For example, if you heal 6 targets with a Wild Mushroom Bloom, it may do 1000 healing to each (total of 6000). If you heal 8 targets, it would do 750 to each (total of 6000). The net result is that AoE heals heal for the same total amount on more than 6 targets, but it is split between all of the targets. Additionally, pets do not count toward the TargetCount. If you heal 8 targets and 2 pets with the same Bloom, all 8 players and 2 pets would each get 750 (total of 6000 to players, 1500 to pets).

Ret took it to the face this build. Was it 'doing more damage than intended?
No, just you Chaz.

We have made several adjustments based on player feedback, raid testing, and fixing some bugs. Some of the changes were made to keep secondary stats scaling appropriately and some were when specs were doing too much damage. Here's a quick cheat sheet for where we are. Even "tuned" does not mean set in stone and ready for ship.

Does this mean mechanics are done and it's all just numbers tuning now?
No.

Death Knight (Forums / Skills)
An update for Blood death knights: We’re going to try returning the Crimson Scourge passive, with a minor tweak. You have a 10% chance on melee hit against a Blood Plague diseased target to make your next Blood Boil or Death and Decay free.

To add to this: Is it possible to let Crimson Scourge build up charges (I was thinking of up to 2) to carry over between packs?
And does CS reset DnD's CD as well? Also, can we assume DnD/BB's cast with Crimson Scourge will not generate RP so it doesn't mess with the current tank balance?
Nope, no charges; we want sitting on the proc to be a damage loss, but an option when you want to make sure you have one up for a soon to be incoming pack of mobs. It currently has a 15 sec duration. It does not reset Death and Decay’s cooldown. If it did, you’d almost always use it on Death and Decay; we want you to use it for a mix of Death and Decays and Blood Boils. And no, the free ones will not generate RP.

Druid (Forums / Skills)Feral PvP on the other hand, needs some help. Our defense is almost non existent and the SR situation is just awkward at best. Feral PvP HP looks like a roller coaster... falling and rising fast, it's stressful and isn't very fun to be honest.
We gave Survival Instincts back to Feral recently. Not sure if you have that change.

So, with regards to moonkin dots and our new nuke-crit refresh mechanic, I'm assuming that's not an "indefinite refresh" model, so there's no recalculation. What I'm wondering is, when we get 2s, are we getting 2s of hasted dot, or are we merely getting one more tick, no matter our haste? Again, assuming it's 2s of whatever haste you had, so it could potentially be 2 extra ticks at high enough haste ratings.

Related to that, the moonkin 4pc adds 4s to our dots. For the sake of calculating break points, do we add 4s/2 ticks to the dot duration, or is that calculated in a funny way? In other words, will we have to calculate new breakpoints for 4pc versus no 4pc, or will the 4pc dots be calculated something like 14s + 4s (7 ticks + 2 ticks) for the sake of breakpoints?
The Moonkin DoT refresh mechanic adds 1 tick, regardless of haste. The 4T14 bonus adds 4sec to the base duration of the DoTs, so all haste calculations are done as if it started at 18sec.

You were supposed to nerf Dream of Cenarius not the base spells. Nerfing mastery and the base spell damage coefficents., for Balance, just favors the continuing problem.
The nerfs you see in this build help bring Moonkin down to the right level without Dream of Cenarius. Dream of Cenarius is still on the chopping block, and will be appropriately adjusted soon.

This recent change also makes Soul of the Forest a no brainer over Incarnation for the same reason. The reduction from 18 second moonfire and sunfire, to 14 second DoTs makes it so you can not transition in one set of dots to a new eclipse. Because of this you will have to choose Soul of the Forest to keep dps in pace.
Can you show some evidence of this? We’re seeing it within a couple % (and actually losing to Incarnation) of the rest of the row.

P.S. Why are treants even there?
Because they do good damage? And they want to be your friend?

Hunter (Forums / Skills)Against a level 85 dummy, I do significantly less dps (4-5k) with a level 87 BM hunter than I do on live with a level 85 hunter - using an inferior weapon, no less.
When you log into the big rule changing patch, our intent is not for your DPS to change much. Hunters may be in a special situation because of the expertise change -- I'll have to dig into that more.

However, when you jump to level 87, it wouldn't surprise me for your DPS to drop because all of your combat ratings change. This is just one of the unfortunate aspects of the way our gear progression works. The alternative, at least until we come up with something better, is your crit chance just increases each expansion until it hits 100%. It also sounds like you're using quest greens, which might be higher ilevel, but probably can't compete with all the gems, enchants and set bonuses of Dragon Soul gear (assuming you have some). Once you reach 90 and start getting blue and purple gear, your DPS will grow higher than it is currently on live. A lot.

Posting specific numbers (even rounded off ones, like "I do 47K") would help.

First, this is a great thread. Thank you for both the moderation and responses. I hope you have similar threads even after MoP gets released. A few hunter comments and issues:

- Dire beast based damage scaling was reduced from 0.5715 to 0.3572. That wasn't documented, so I wanted to confirm that it was intentional.Dire Beast’s attack power scaling coefficient was indeed reduced from 3.2 to 2.0.

- The pet focus regen appears to be 5* the hunter's focus regen multiplier. Is that correct?
Pet Focus regen is indeed 5 base, and inherits 100% of your haste, so its focus regen should be multiplied by the same amount as yours. Or, an easier way to look at it is that since your base regen is 4, and its is 5, and both are increased by the same amount, its focus regen will be equal to yours * 1.25.

- The new explosive shot damage mechanics are great.
Glad the new Explosive Shot mechanics are working well.

- Kill Command doesn't refund focus on a miss/dodge. Because of the same massive dodge issue, it seems like it should (just like other focus-costing shots). What's your plan here?Kill Command should be refunding on avoids in the next build.

- Focus fire didn't used to cost a GCD. With a GCD, it interferes with a smooth rotation in BM and is simming as a very poor value CD (~1%). Is the GCD intentional?
We just buffed Focus Fire further, to 8% per stack, and nerfed Frenzy to 8% per stack.

- The CD for Devilsaur's monstrous bite interferes with casting Bite. The next result is that exotic beasts have noticeably lower stampede damage because they miss out on casting one Bite during the period they are up. Since the special abilities have their own CDs (e.g., monstrous bite has an 8 second CD), can the casting GCD be removed? The GCD interaction seems to add no useful constraint and just reduces the dps value of devilsaurs (and possibly a few other pets) below non-exotic pets.
- Similarly, there remains a (latency) delay between when a pet could do something and when it does. Thus even though the CD for Bite is 3 seconds, pets only Bite every 3.3 seconds.
- The above two issues combine to strongly impact the value of the devilsaur buff (and possibly other similar buffs). The pets often do not reapply the buffs until they notice that the buff has dropped. This leaves a gap in the uptime. Because of GCD interaction, that gap may be expanded by casting other abilities. In dummy tests, it was not uncommon to get a 5 second gap between castings of the 8 second Monstrous Bite buff. If you were counting on reducing Warlord Zon’ozz's heal, this would not suffice (a similar issue appeared with hyene's though their buff has been changed in MoP). The net result is that my poor DinoMight both fails to bring a real buff and has lower damage than otherm more pedestrian pets. This makes Dino unhappy
We just did a pass on Hunter pet abilities, and took any that are expected to be kept up the whole time off the GCD. Also, if any had durations equal to their cooldown, we either reduced the cooldown or increased the duration, so that there’s some slush room for overlapping.

- Powershot was simming fairly low compared to just not using it at all in most specs. This seems partly because it suppresses autoattack so the opportunity cost is high. Are there any plans to change Powershot?Powershot (and that whole row) has been significantly buffed in the next build you’ll get.

Currently Simc implements all the single-target hunter mechanics as we understand them. Thanks again for the communication on this thread!
You’re welcome. We’re finding it very useful as well.

Is there a design purpose in why aimed shot, powershot and barrage all suppress autoshot? It seems strange to me that the 2.0 cast time shots do not and the 2.9 and 3.0 ones do. For MM in particular, it seems to conflict with the design of the mastery, since suppressing autoshot will reduce wild quiver procs and long cast time shots mean less chances for wild quiver procs as well. It also potentially creates a micromanagement benefit that I thought was intended to be removed when autoshot was changed to work while moving.Aimed Shot should feel different, like you’re distinctly pausing to precisely aim a perfect shot. That’s mostly a kit thing. In terms of gameplay, it reinforces that Arcane Shot should usually be your primary focus dump (but Aimed being a better dump during periods of high haste is cool and something that we do intend to continue supporting). Powershot was in a similar boat, but we changed our mind on that, in order to help balance the talent row; in the new build going up now it no longer interrupts Auto Shot. Barrage still seems weird to allow Autos during, but it does give you more Wild Quiver procs on average so handles the balance concern.

Also on the question of design intent, I'm noticing that in my sims pet damage for BM is extremely high relative to hunter damage (in the realm of almost 60% with stampede included). Historically I thought the goal was always to keep pet damage at minimum lower than the hunter's. Is the current situation just because you guys are still tweaking things or do you think it's acceptable for such a high percentage of the damage to come from a pet?
We’re not seeing pet damage that high in our results; it’s topping out at around 45%, which we’re OK with (for BM only, of course).

Mage (Forums / Skills)Got a quick question about the 3% crit chance reduction against +3 level targets: is it calculated before or after crit multipliers?

My assumption is that it's subtracted after the other calculations, but as this could have a meaningful impact on simulation numbers, it'd be good to know for sure.
Before.
A Frost mage with 23.60% character sheet crit will crit 20.60% of the time normally, or 91.20% of the time with Shatter. ((23.6-3)*2+50 = 91.2)
A Fire mage with 36.71% character sheet crit will crit 50.57% of the time with Fireball (and other Critical Mass buffed spells). ((36.71-3)*1.5 = 50.565)

Monk (Forums / Skills)Is there a reason why Chi Wave has a cooldown?
We rebuilt how Chi Wave functions under the hood, so it should feel much more responsive. Give it a try in the next build. Unfortunately, it still needs to have a cooldown for technical reasons. We wanted to take the cooldown off, but there were some issues with having multiple Chi Waves bouncing around at the same time from the same Monk, so we put the cooldown back on.

We also just retuned the level 30 row, Chi Wave bounces 7 times, and Chi Burst does 25% less damage/healing.

What is the motivation behind taking away Spirit -> Hit conversion for all healing spex except Mistweaver? It's a perk I really appreciated in Cata. You have bandaided the issue in PvE by kitchen-sinking the abilities healers are expected to use, but the spell-specific bonuses don't help PvP or more specialized PvE situations, where heals need to use their entire control toolkit, not just spam Smite.
We want healers to do reasonable DPS, but we’re always wary of healers being able to do damage comparable to their damage specs. With much of the Mists overhaul and the de-emphasis on passives, we were concerned that say a Resto shaman would be able to Lightning Bolt as well as an Elemental shaman. Limiting the amount of free hit floating around (which is a stat healers don’t stack) helps to keep their DPS in check. It’s possible now that so many abilities are affected that it would be fine to let all spells benefit from hit, but that’s the concern.

Curious about this statement. Given that Brewmasters' damage taken (and therefore Vengeance under the new model as I understand it) is highly correlated to their Purifying Brew use, what is it that their damage is going to be tuned around? As is, I can tweak my damage taken by around +/- 30% by just varying my PB usage. How frequently will you assume PB is used when tuning our (Brewmasters') damage?Purifying Brew usage will not affect Vengeance. Damage taken from the Stagger DoT does not cause Vengeance. When taking damage directly, you get Vengeance for the pre-Stagger damage, so you already got "credit" for taking that damage again. You don't get to double-dip when you take the damage as the Stagger DoT.

While on the topic of PB, can it be documented somewhere what the colors (green, yellow, red) of the Stagger stack mean, exactly?
The color is purely for display purposes, to give you a quick indication of how strong the Stagger DoT currently is. The logic for the colors is based on the damage per tick as a % of your max health. Red means >6%, Yellow means >3%, Green means >0%.

Is it your intent that WW monks use Fists of Fury as a part of their single target dps rotation? I'm sure you have read the issues that the majority of monks have with a channeled melee ability in raids. Perhaps a glyph that allowed you to channel it while moving but would also remove the stun would make the move itself more viable?
It is intended. We understand it can be a little challenging to use it, but we’re okay with that. The damage was recently too low to justify using it rotationaly, but that should be better now.

Paladin (Forums / Skills)
An update for paladins: we're going to buff Word of Glory and slightly nerf Light of Dawn. We will likely nerf Bastion of Glory enough to offset this change, but need additional testing first. For now, we are not changing Ret's WoG bonus so it will be buffed for them as well.

What is the vision and role of Hammer of Wrath? Like many of my fellow Paladins in this thread we are confused as to the direction this spell is going. The spell has previously been an execute and like all the other executes in the game, it was a fun hard hitting ability when we were fortunate to get the chance to use it. My concern is with the relationship with Sanctified Wrath and it being an execute ability. Is SW causing the nerfs to this ability?
I think what you’re really asking is “Can Hammer of Wrath hit harder?” It can, but that means nerfing all of the other abilities to compensate for its damage. It’s still a good button. I’m not sure all execute abilities need to be comparable, and in fact if they are, it’s one of those things that makes classes feel really similar. We wanted to restore the warrior Execute to its original design of basically being able to kill a solo questing target.

Prot Paladin DPS (that phrase alone caused me to lol) seems to have taken a hit as a result of Ret tuning. Judgement and Censure feel overly weak now. SotR has always felt weak (but is a bit more spammable and has a defensive buff).
That is possible. We specifically were tuning the DPS specs, so it’s possible we threw Protection’s damage inadvertently low. If so, we can easily adjust it upwards.

Eternal Flame is now really hurting compared to Selfless Healer.
We’re not convinced of this yet. Eternal Flame was broken so of course it felt like a great button (and before that everyone was using Selfless Healer). The tick itself isn’t huge but it ends up being a lot of healing over the course of the spell duration. This is just how hots work – they are the antithesis of burst but still contribute to a lot of healing (and overhealing) without taking up a lot of healer GCDs.

In the same vein as Elemental Blast for Resto Shamans, can Holy Prism be added to the Holy Insight passive for Holy Paladins? Testing it on a Raiding Target Dummy, it misses just enough to be an annoyance, if I wanted to use it as an AoE heal for the tanks and melee.
That makes sense.

I checked a few dps calculators, and it seems that while Seal of Truth is indeed scaling with AP, Seal of Justice isn't. It's only scaling with Base Weapon Damage. Is that intended as well?
I just checked, and both of them just scale with normalized weapon damage. Censure itself scales with AP.

Two the changes to Eternal Flame was this fixing the bug? If so that is a pretty significant bug. A lot of recent logs showed EF being ahead of every other spell or at the very top of usage. As some suggested this isn't exactly a gamebreaking nerf to the class but it raises a good question I think is that are people going to go back to Selfless Healer?
In essence, Eternal Flame's hot was benefiting from Holy Power twice. We want it to be a competitive talent but not mandatory.

The more relevant point I wanted to make though as we continue to test is that having the entire community shift from one perceived best talent to another isn't super helpful. If we fail at our balancing and one talent is the best on live then I certainly won't blame anyone for choosing that talent. (I'll cry into my coffee mug of gin, but I won't blame you.) However, during the beta testing stage, it's much more helpful if players try out every talent rather than just choosing the one that conventional wisdom or the forums or the hardcore raiders say is the best. They may very well be right, but that just limits the exposure, testing and feedback of the other talents. This isn't the time to be the best. This is the time to give us feedback while there is still time for us to react.

Priest (Forums / Skills)
An update for priests: we're going to reduce the cost of all heals by 10%, reduce the mana gain from Inner Focus, but buff Discipline to 50% Meditation. We're also making Power Infusion priest only, for fear that priests will be asked to choose that talent to benefit someone else.

From the simulations I've done, t14h shadow was sitting very middle of the pack post DP nerf. It was really quite acceptable at 109k dps in T14h (Even with some other classes up around the 120k mark)
It might be helpful to mention what are the classes that you believe are trumping Shadow. I’m not saying this is the case here, but what often happens is we nerf A, B and C, and all the B players only really read or understand the B nerfs, so in their mind, their nerfed B is still competing with a pre-nerf A and C.

Is the Healing Rain mana cost decrease a second one in addition to the one that went live today?
No, we just made one change so it sounds like you already have a build with that change.

Healing Stream Totem is a button you have to use every 30 seconds, and Searing Totem is a button you have to use every 60 seconds. No need to target anybody or do anything other than hit these buttons when the cooldowns are up. Are these abilities OK?
Yes. Those abilities are on the GCD so you are choosing to them instead of something else, and in any event, you can't build a macro these days that just pushes all of your rotational buttons for you.

Abilities off the GCD are more dangerous. An ability like Recklessness still isn't typically macro'd because lining it up with other cooldowns (including Bloodlust) is usually more beneficial. However abilities that give you resources, off the GCD, without a risk of wasting that resource are the ones to take a hard look at.

Malefic Grasp is currently not causing extra 50% ticks from the Seed of Corruption DoT effect, is this intended? The Tooltip for MG reads "all your other affliction periodic damage effects", and the dot component of SOC should surely fall under that description.
That seems totally fair, we’ll try to get that in, but it may be a few builds.

i've noticed the Demonic Gateway transports you slowly if going from the purple one to the green one. is it indended?This just in! Huge buff to warlocks! Purple Gateway now transports you just as fast as Green Gateway, a 50% buff.

Warrior (Forums / Skills)Is enrages while enraged not proc'ing more charges of Raging Blows intended?
It is for the moment at least, but we're not crazy about it. Specifically, using Berserker Rage while Enrage is up doesn't give you more rage or Raging Blow charges. The concern was that Fury would just macro Berserker Rage into every attack. With the previous design, this wasn't worth doing because once you were enraged being more enraged wasn't valuable. Now it is. It's more intuitive (and probably fun) if Berserker Rage always grants a charge, but we want Berserker Rage to be a button warriors actually use, not macro. Another option would be to put Berseker Rage on the GCD, but we thought this would feel even worse. If we become convinced warriors won't macro Berserker Rage, we'll happily revert the change.

To elaborate, we don't have a problem with macro'ing say Nature's Swiftness with Healing Touch. You are still making a decision about when you are going to use the spell. But if you're using a macro to tell the game that you want to use Berserker Rage on cooldown no matter what, then the ability isn't adding anything to the game and should just be a passive.

Currently is seems like, unless cleaving is part of a bosses mechanics Arms falls well blow Fury. My current theory is simply because Arms doesn't benefit from Haste buffs at all. Hero gives 30% Haste for 40 seconds, Swiftblade's Cunning gives 10% Attack Speed buff.
We're working on another major balance pass, based on having made several bug fixes. At the moment, we're showing Fury ahead of Arms at 85 but the two specs pretty close at 90 with a variety of gear level. AE needs a bit more work because there are so many different AE scenarios (quick cleaves vs. sustained mass AE burn phases and everything in between).

What Zelix was getting at is that Haste is a low-value stat for DPS warriors, particularly Arms. During Cataclysm, it was worth about 1/2 as much as Mastery and 1/3 as much as Crit; we avoided gear with it. My own beta observation is that for Arms it's up to about 1/2 of Crit's value and 3/5s of Mastery's. Subject to someone telling me my numbers are wrong, that appears to be better, though not great (and it could also be because the removal of Impale and old Deep Wounds has devalued Crit, resulting in a relative increase only). Our concern is scaling, really.
We hurt haste's value with the Enrage change, but we thought it was still a good change for gameplay reasons. As I posted above, we haven't made a pass on warriors lately. If we have to, we could always make Deep Wounds tick with haste, even though we typically don't do so for melee for reasons I outlined much earlier.Also, Haste was horrible even before the Enrage changed. 7101 Haste Rating gave you an extra 14 swings over a 5 minute fight. Then it was based PURELY on crit if those 14 extra swings even mattered in the end.

Also, does the +10% Attack Speed count as "melee/range haste", or just attack speed?
I asked this because I didn't include it in my calculations above, because I'm confused as to how it works. (Lowers the Cast Time of Steady/Cobra Shot on my Hunter.)
“Horrible” isn’t very descriptive. Haste was much closer to crit before the Enrage change than it is on live and is now. As I mentioned, the Enrage change, which was a good change overall, did hurt haste. We agree it’s a problem, but we’re not sure yet how to fix it. We don’t think lowering GCD or cooldowns would work well for warriors. I can elaborate if it’s not obvious why.

The melee “haste” buff such as Icy Talons is just attack speed, not regen.

What actions will be taken to ensure that deadly clam doesn't fall victim to being bound to heroic strike and forgotten?
We believe it is sub-optimal to do so. Deadly Calm (for Arms and Fury) doesn't make Heroic Strike free, so it's possible you won't have enough rage to benefit from all of the attacks. Arms needs to watch Heroic Strike use for Taste for Blood and Fury sometimes needs to use it rotationally when Raging Blow isn't available. If it's convenient for you to macro it, that's fine with us, so long as the best possible DPS is to decide when you use Deadly Calm. (Having a separate HS key and a HS + DC key is totally different.)

Inner Focus, which someone might have mentioned, is more problematic. It is probably always worth using on cooldown for the mana benefits alone.

There may be other "no brainer to macro" abilities, but those are things we want to fix, not templates that it's okay for Berserker Rage (which started this discussion) to be a no brainer.

Blue Posts

Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment

30 Hours to Earn a Piece of Valor Gear?
To answer the original question, no those numbers are not accurate. Without getting into all of the details, we have features like a bonus for the first activity of the day to encourage players to experiment with lots of different types of content rather than just solving which is the most efficient and running that until you're very sick of it (we call this the Mechanar Syndrome). We can try to put together a blog or some other way to convey all of the different ways to earn valor and how it all fits together.

Now, we are asking you to participate some in daily quests, scenarios, raid finder, challenge modes and the other new systems we're introducing in Mists of Pandaria. One of the pieces of feedback we heard loud and clear from Cataclysm is "I'm done raiding for the week and want to play WoW, but there is nothing to do." I know it's easy to dismiss everything that we're trying to give you to do as grinding, and I don't think we'll be able to change your mind on that until you get in the game and actually try out the content. We're pretty excited about it. Also note that players who raid the most will likely need to earn the least valor, because they'll have so many opportunities to get actual item drops.

For those of you only interested in raiding full stop, we were able to deliver a bunch of bosses for 5.0. So I think it's cynical to say that we're just adding grinding mechanics to stretch out the lifespan of the content. It's more that we're trying to give you something to do in between raids that feels like you're still making progress on your character.

Q: Why didn't you need to do that in prior expansions?
A: There was no LFR allowing casual players to full clear the raids in less than two hours.
Nah, we had farming for Whipper Root Tubers. Very compelling gameplay.

Is there a reason you're FORCING us to do daily quests for rep instead of allowing us to CHOOSE to grind the rep in dungeons?
Essentially because dungeons already reward loot from bosses and valor. Letting them also provide faction seems extraneous. Why not just increase the boss drops or give you more valor to let you buy stuff?

Here's how we got there though:

BC had an extensive attunement system. (I'm not passing judgment on that system because I kind of liked it myself.)

As part of that system, you were required to acquire a lot of reputation with different factions, which you achieved primarily by running dungeons over and over. This meant you might have a dude that needed to run Shadow Labs 3 more times while someone else needed Mechanar or Botanica.

To solve that problem, we let players wear tabards so they could earn whatever faction they wanted while running dungeons.

This made things much more convenient for players, arguably too convenient. The factions themselves sort of lost their identity. They were just different bars to fill. Also, sometimes by the time you hit Exalted or Revered with a given faction, you already had better gear from running the dungeon so much.

In Mists, we want to provide players alternative content to running dungeons. The dungeons are still there, but even with 6 new and 3 redone dungeons, you're ready for something else after a while.

Part of that something else are the Elder faction quests, such as Klaxxi and Shado-Pan. We put as much work into these quest chains as we did the level-up zone quests. The stories evolve and new branches unlock. You earn faction by doing these quests and can also earn valor to layer on top of what you're earning from dungeons, or even in lieu of dungeons if you just don't have enough time or aren't interested in a dungeon at that moment.

As I said above, I know not everyone loves questing. (For that matter not everyone loves mount collection or pet battles or achievements or raiding). Strictly speaking, you don't have to do the factions to progress your characters, but we figure a lot of players will.

We could have a long discussion, probably beyond the scope of this thread, about how much time you should have to commit to feel like you're keeping up with end game progression vs. how much extra time you should be able to commit if you're interested in doing so. In Cataclysm, we think we steered too far into the zone of telling players to stop playing because there was nothing else to do.

No developer wants to hear "I want to play your game, but there's nothing to do." For Mists, we are going out of our way to give players lots to do. We don't want it to be overwhelming, but we do want it to be engaging. We want you to have the option of sitting down to an evening of World of Warcraft rather than running your daily dungeon in 30 minutes and then logging out. We understand we have many players (certainly the majority in fact) who can't or aren't interested in making huge commitments to the game every week and we hope we have structured things so that you don't fall very far behind. The trick is to let players who want to play make some progress without leaving everyone else in the dust. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Content Difficulty and Consumption SpeedThe only people that don't seem to understand this are either the ones entering this thread and bashing people like me for being "elitist" or a "special snowflake" without me trying to be one, and the other two that deliberately refuses to understand us / avoids the good questions / behave badly - are an MVP and the representative known as Draztal.
I'm not refusing to understand you. But I have the feeling you (and some others) won't feel I understand you until I say "Yes, you're right". I've provided ample answers on many of the topics we've touched on this thread, and I've questioned those things that looked odd to me. And in return I've gotten angry answers from some individuals that just refused to accept that perhaps there's more to consider than just their point of view.

There's no way you can say I'm refusing to understand this topic when I've posted in this thread over 60 times already.

You've simply painted the view of this spurious group of "other players" (which nobody has seen any real evidence of) and completely sidelined those of opposing view.
Quite a few have actually posted on this thread. And there's no "opposing view". This isn't a fight. My replies have just tried to show the other side of the coin to the arguments being made, because there's one, and it can't be ignored.

We can argue about it until the cows come home, but that person is saying "tier 13 was wholly underwhelming and felt a lot less epic". So far, your response has been thus: "You don't speak for everyone, lots of people who play differently to you think it's great".
Actually no, I've never written anything like that. I've said there're other players that are currently being challenged by that content, even if you aren't.

If a person is saying that T13 has been underwhelming for them (and I'm sure there're folks out there for which it has been), then I can only say that it's unfortunate it wasn't fun for him/her.

For some of us - me, at least - the problem is serious enough to be gamebreaking; something must change or my interest in the game will not be sufficient enough to warrant continuing to pay for my subscription. I'd imagine that this sort of feedback - from a customer on the verge of quitting - would be extremely valuable to Blizzard.
Feedback is always valuable, but not everything that is said is useful. As unfortunate as it may sound that's the way it is. There's not much of use from saying "TBC was great, bring it back" (not saying it's your case). It's far more useful to express what you don't like, what you don't agree on with the current game philosophy and point those things out.

Some people have said they'd like attunements to be brought back, and we've already mentioned that the developers don't have any plans at the moment to bring them back. Same case, some people have asked if we can guarantee if Challenge mode dungeons won't be nerfed, and we've also provided a reply about that.

As such i apreciate your presence here Draztal, i am just very sad that your perspective on the game and obviously blizzard's perspective judging on the direction the game is taking, is so far away from what it used to be and what i like.
Challenging content is there. Now you'll also have the Cutting Edge feats of strength so there's a reason to go and do content without the debuff. Furthermore, you've got bosses with heroic-only phases like Sha of Fear. Feng the Accursed also has a phase that only appears on Heroic. Then you have the Protectors of the Endless, which provide even better loot than usual if you kill Protector Kaolan last (that loot is tagged Heroic Elite for the heroic mode version, and Elite for the normal mode).

And you'll also have Challenge Dungeons. So, yeah, I understand that looking to what we're leaving behind (Dragon Soul with the Power of the Aspects debuff), it may seem like nothing challenging is lying ahead, but the fact is, there's plenty of content that will test your skills.

So where is our territory? The one in which lazy players don't have a right to step in? And no, I wont accept the "casuals" thing. Its not about casuals, its about players that don't want to put time and effort in, for whatever reason. I raided 9 hours per week the entire expansion and I'm done with your content for 4 months now. If that's "hardcore", I guess I don't know the meaning of hardcore.
If they are raiding and killing bosses they are putting effort and time. Ii for you that time and effort spend is not enough is a different discussion.

So, if you want players to accept that you understand and accept your answers, start by admitting there is a problem with the game as it is now.
I don't think there's anything wrong with having players progressing today. And the developers have their data to see that everytime they've increased the debuff the participation rate in Dragon Soul has increased exponentially in comparison to previous weeks.

And if you manage to admit there something is wrong somewhere, there might be a chance for discussion - because right now, you are talking by yourself behind a nice thick wall (well, not alone, you got Jito there to keep you company). Maybe the problem isn't as big as we make it, but I think it still exists, which is more than you are willing to admit.
Nothing is perfect. And I believe that the fact that there're things like the Cutting Edge achievements being added, Challenge mode dungeons and more bosses with Heroic only phases (like those I've mentioned), etc, should be proof that the devs have certainly not stopped developing content for the crowd that wants a challenge.

It isn't only that. Back then you had a mountain to climb, with several smaller tops you couldn't skip. No matter when you started, the mountain would be waiting.
But if you started late, some levels of that mountain were completely barren. And actually some guilds were just feeding guilds in the upper side, as some players felt they were encouraged to jump from guild to guild climbing through the raiding progress rather than sticking with their own guild.

Regarding LFR and what some of you guys have suggested about delaying it for more than one week, here're the developers thoughts about it:

Players want to see the content. And is true that some (many?/all?) would stop running it if there was no loot. So something like not giving loot at all is not an option the devs are considering.

The reality is that LFR holds little competitive advantadge to hardcore raiders, especially in Mists of Pandaria. The most hardcore guilds will clear Mogu'shan Vaults on normal difficulty on the first week, and on the second week (when LFR will be open) they'll be able to run LFR and also Heroic. So, after a couple weeks, LFR would offer little benefit to a hardcore guild.

Regarding the delay of LFR furthen than a week, the developers feel it's unnecesarily punishing those players that aren't part of organized guilds. Even more if we keep in mind that one of the reasons to delay it more is to keep hardcore raiders from feeling obligated to run it.

One of the reasons why currently raiders (both normal and heroic) feel "forced" to do LFR is because it's possible to increase your and your guildmates chances of winning items by gaming the loot system. Since Mists of Pandaria introduces personal loot, using the system in this way won't be possible.

Something I missed yesterday on my post. Regarding putting LFR on the same lockout with normal or Heroic modes:

It's something the developers may consider, but there're no immediate plans for it. There's plenty of logisitical issues they'd need to sort out first to make it function in a logical way.

i dont want LFR on the same lockout. i want it removed. if players dont put in enough time and effort, they dont deserve to be rewarded with content.
What benefit would that bring to the game?

How do you explain to John Doe that he shouldn't even think about raiding in World of Warcraft because you feel that anyone that can't devote *this* much time to raiding just should not be allowed in? Furthermore, why would John Doe, the person that can't devote *this* much time to raid but would like to, have any interest in venturing into Azeroth?

Do you feel it's just alright to tell someone "sorry bud, you're interested on this game, but you don't have the time, go play something more fitting to you, like Solitaire"?

If you don't see anything wrong with that, then it's going to be difficult to have any kind of discussion in that topic. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Lack of 25 man Guilds10 and 25 share a lockout. 10 and 25 share loot. Legendaries can be obtained on 10 man
As you can see from all the answers you got on this thread, there are many reasons for having so many 10 man raids going on right now.
I would also add that we're in "low season" at the moment, DS has been running for quite a while and a lot of players are waiting for MoP, so there's less people willing to raid right now.

Also, on top of all those facts you still have to take into account the simple personal preferences of players, while for some people, 25 man dungeons might be appealing, for others, 10 man's are just much more enjoyable, and there are many reasons for that to happen, it’s easier to get a better group cohesion, it can be much calmer and less messier, they’re the usual choice for groups of friends, it’s easier to get 10 really good players and coordinate them than 25, provides a visually smoother experience (it’s less cpu and gpu intensive, this is particularly relevant to players without high-end PCs), etc…
I suspect that we'll see an increase in the amount of 25 man guilds when MoP launches, but 10 man will probably still remain as the most popular choice, there are just too many things in its favour.

We just like to give players more options to choose from, that's why 25 and 10 share the same lockout, encounter difficulty (similar but not the same) and rewards, it's fine if we see more 10 man's than 25's, it’s all about giving players freedom of choice. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Reduction of Gold From Older Raids in Mists of Pandaria
We know that a lot of players enjoy soloing old content and we certainly don't mean to discourage players from continuing to do so but the reality is that there were certain raids or parts of raids that were incredibly lucrative for solo players.

We could do a series of hotfixes to take care of those farming areas one by one, but that wouldn’t make much sense since we’re about to launch a new expansion and we have an opportunity to deal with the situation now in a much more effective way. So to stop the impact that soloing raids has over the economy, we think it makes much more sense to change the formula for the way the gold drops across the board. Soloing will continue to be quite profitable if you take into consideration AoE looting and vendoring drops (the rates have not changed on item drops).

I do realize this isn’t probably what you all wanted to hear and that it’s hard when a nerf is made to something you enjoy doing, but the fact remains this really did impact the economy in ways we feel we shouldn’t have allowed in the first place. We realize there are certainly a few other things that might also impact the economy that might still need to be taken care of, but that’s not a rational reason why we shouldn’t be fixing this one if we can.

We really don’t want to kill the fun out of running old raids, why would we undermine an experience (even if unintended) that players enjoy? It certainly doesn’t make sense, so keeping that in mind I really want to make sure you are confident about your feedback being heard and about it getting to the developers.

Also, remember we’re still in Beta, things can still change, numbers can be tuned, etc… so please do continue to voice your opinion and keep giving us feedback in a constructive and collaborative manner, we both share the same goal of improving our game and developers are always open to better ideas.

Is there a chance we are going to completely revert this? Probably not, can it be adjusted? Certainly, make a good case, with some backed up arguments and numbers and hey, devs are reasonable people, they will hear what you have to say.

I can definitely understand how frustrating this must be to some of you and I really appreciate the way you continue to keep this thread constructive and bringing up very insightful observations.
Like I said, we still have plenty of time to do any kind of tuning or changes to the game before it goes live and your feedback might just be that extra factor that can turn the tides on certain decisions. I just would like to emphasize how persuasive careful and thought-out feedback can actually be, so please, if you have anything constructive and new to add to this topic, please let your voice be heard.

While I share some of your concerns on the amount of gold dropping from bosses possibly being a little bit on the low side, and I must say that I haven’t personally tested this myself on the beta, I was wondering if any of you with beta access has already tried to see just how much gold one can make by actually vendoring all the loot that you can get inside a raid, since AOE looting probably made it time efficient enough to kill all the trash packs instead of skipping them and going straight to bosses.

Also, I would like to shed some light on the constant comparison that is being made between playing the auction house and looting gold from bosses. I think this can be one of those fallacious arguments that can easily slip through as a valid argument and needs to be addressed.

There is a huge difference between these two, which is, playing the auction house doesn’t “create gold", looting does.
Just like in real life economics, adding gold to the system creates what is called inflation, prices rise because the amount of goods remains unaltered, while at the same time the amount of gold rises. So if players have more gold, they will be willing to spend more on the same quantity of items, and since prices are totally dependent on the laws of supply and demand, prices will consequently rise.
We can compare looting to doing dailies though, that argument works, since both generate gold, but we can't compare it with the auction house, that’s only a transaction of goods and not a generation of goods (actually this isn’t totally true, since there is an AH cut, so it can actually be considered a soft gold sink). (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

What Purpose Does LFR Have?
I think this is an extremely sensitive topic and I would like to approach it very carefully.

First I think we have to realize that WoW is not just any game, it unleashes very passionate feelings on its players. It’s been a part of everyone’s life for so long that it has acquired a status that sometimes can rival many things in real life, it’s an amazing game, it really is, and you know this, otherwise you wouldn’t be here wasting your precious time discussing about how to improve it.

But you do take that time to help us improve our games, and you deserve to be heard, more so, we really want and need to hear what you have to say, you are the reason we have a community department. One of the biggest advantages of having this level of interaction is that we can act as intermediaries between you and the developers, and this is where your feedback comes in.

We realize that LFR is a controversial feature and you can rest assured that we are paying full attention to the impact it has over our community. Some of us do share a lot of your concerns, but as always, we’re all different players, with different perspectives and objectives, so opinions on the matter will vary greatly.

What I really want to emphasize here is that we really do hear all of you. As a company we obviously need to have a common vision, planning, strategy, and goal, but understand that individually, most of us play our games just as passionately as you do. We all experience what you experience and this includes developers, game designers and project managers, and most importantly, we all have our own different opinions. It’s from the gathering and discussion of these opinions and the ones from our players that together we can reach a common vision with the common goal of making our games the best that they can possibly be.

Still you must realize that game designers can’t take in all feedback and apply it directly to the game, that’s why they were selected as game designers, they are great at making decisions, and these can be really tough to make sometimes, which is why changes usually cause controversy.

When LFR came out I too had quite a few concerns about it, just like I’m sure many of you had, and obviously, still have to this day.
LFR is still considered a new feature, we’re constantly evaluating its receptivity and its role on filling the gap between casual players and raiding without having it ruin anyone else’s game experience, it’s currently being tweaked for MoP and I’m sure it will continue to be adjusted until devs are completely satisfied with it.

Having said that, I would like give a few updates about LFR and its future in MoP.
We know that currently some guilds will feel that they aren’t maximizing their potential if they don’t run LFR to get particular pieces of gear and tier set bonuses when they’re starting to progress through DS, but for MoP you can expect LFR to provide very little competitive advantage (if any) to those guilds and here’s why:

We’re delaying LFR by one week, we don’t think there is a real need to delay it further than that. It would be an unnecessary punishment to players not in organized guilds because chances are that the real hardcore guilds out there will be able to clear Mogu'shan Vaults on normal difficulty within the first week of its release, which by the time they will be eligible to run LFR, they will also be eligible to start progressing on Heroic mode.
So within a couple of weeks, LFR should serve almost no purpose to any hardcore raiding guild.

We must not forget that there is also another reason why those guilds feel that they’re currently “forced” to run LFR, and that reason is, because they can increase their members' chances of winning items by playing the loot system, which they won’t be able to do anymore in Mists of Pandaria with the changes we’ve introduced to the looting system.

Also here’s a brief plan about how raids will open on the LFR:

Mogu'shan Vaults will be split into two tiers, and each tier will have three bosses. Both of those tiers will be available one week after the release of the normal raid, and you will have to clear the first tier before being able to queue for the second one.

Heart of Fear will work in a similar way and will be split into two dungeons for LFR, each with three bosses.

Blanket Silences and PvP BalanceBlanket silences lower the skill floor because they are not counterable (read: powerful) yet they are very simple to use.
I agree with you, it's quite obvious that using silence requires less skill than using normal interrupts but PvP Balance is a very tricky subject to deal with and one that can get extremely complex given the colossal amount of abilities, classes and specs that need to be equalized. I think we have to put a little more faith into development, if silences still exist it's because in a proper testing environment they seem to make sense and be required, if they were to be removed, a lot of other changes would have to follow to make up for the CC loss it opened up on the classes that depended most on them.

For Mists of Pandaria, we’ve tried to reduce the amount of available interrupt abilities across the board, and we certainly don’t intend to increase the amount of silences that already exist. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

PvP Vulnerability During Pet Battles
Only areas that flag you as PVP (such as Tol Barad or Wintergrasp) will affect PVE servers. Sorry for the confusion on this.

Updating Burning Crusade Zones
Going back to update old content is something that we always have to weigh up carefully. Any time spent doing so will take time away from making brand new content and features. But, as always, please make your thoughts known. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Stop Removing and Bringing Back old Armor
There's a real split opinion about this amongst the community. The fact is, we're going to be introducing loads of super slick new transmog gear in future. If you're looking to give your character the edge in the wardrobe department, there will be plenty of new obtainable pieces to aim for. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

No Option to Hide Shoulders
Unfortunately we're not planning on providing a 'hide' option for shoulder slots at this time. But due to transmogrification, there are heaps of options for your shoulder slots. There's no need to have "ugly" shoulders at all. If you just want to avoid the bulkiness of late-game gear, have you tried some minimalistic early game pieces? (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Human Racial
The main reason that players choose the human racial at the moment is to not take a medallion and get a PvE trinket instead. If you take a PvE trinket into a PvP environment in Mists though, you are sacrificing a lot. Not only to mention the base stats being added to medallions, but with PvP power being on them as well, which is an amazing stat, our intent is that PvP trinkets will be balanced out against their PvE counterparts. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

No Archaeology Fragment Reset in Mists of PandariaWhen MoP is released, will our fragment inventory be reset or will we be able to gather up to max now and save it for MoP?
We're probably not going to do any kind of reset. Most professions can stockpile mats to some extent and get a few easy points at the start of an expansion anyway. We don't think the benefits are substantial enough for this to be of a big concern to us. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Priest (Forums / Skills)PW: Solace Change FeedbackSo I have two questions now. Firstly are Disc Priests really expected to spend a quarter of a fight doing nothing? Secondly, why are some classes, bugs aside, allowed to have the room for a huge percentage of over healing when some of us can barely do our job with minimal over healing?
I'm not sure how you can argue that the Mistweaver being idle is an anomaly but the Disc priest being idle is mandatory because he or she lacks mana. It's hard to know without watching a video of the fight why certain healers were not healing 100%. You should be able to heal 100% though. What concerns me the most are those players who are trying to heal e.g. a Raid Finder encounter and running out of mana very quickly, or at least much faster than say Resto druids. Those are the situations I want to understand.

And, uh. FDCL?
I keep comparing Mindbender to Solace because the math is easier. FDCL should be a choice too, but it is about not spending the mana in the first place rather getting it back.

No offence GC but all Priests are having to play the game the way you prefer we are having to stand idle, as in not healing.
I agree, and I believe I said that as an illustration of why Solace will play well for some healing styles and not others. What I keep arguing is that if too many priests take Solace because they feel like they must for mana, that is bad for the game. Buffing the crap out of Solace so that priests feel like they always have enough mana is not a good design decision.

In other words, in Chakra: Sanctuary, every point of mana you spend on Heal buys about 41% fewer hitpoints for your raid than it would if you waited and spent it on PoH instead.
That's intended though. If say 3 people in the group are wounded, then Prayer of Healing is the right answer to that. It shouldn't be more efficient to cast Heal 3 times. If you are using Prayer of Healing to heal 1-2 players, or even more relevant, if you are casting Flash Heal or Greater Heal when a Heal will do, then you will start to run OOM.

Yet you have made nuking mandatory for Disc even without PW:Solace. The buff we get from A/AA cannot be ignored as Beta stands right now and even then we are struggling to compete with other healers, even Holy Priests, with the 25% buff from AA.Archangel doesn't provide mana any longer and is on a 30 sec cooldown. I'm not certain that casting all of those Smites for the Archangel benefit net gets you ahead in HPS or HPM. If it does benefit your HPS in the long run (it was pretty break even last I looked), then I concede we took the choice away that Disc used to have about whether to use Atonement / Archangel or not.

I want to thank everyone who is arguing intelligently and providing numbers. All of that helps.

Crzed explains far better than I can why A/AA is now mandatory (he's talking specifically about Archangel here)
Yes, that was a good explanation. Penance plus Glyphed Holy Fire lets you stack Evangelism very quickly, which then makes you feel like you're supposed to do so. Probably the right solution is to have Penance provide only 1 stack (or even none).

Pretty much the same thing I was going to post. You say PoH is the right answer for 3 people and in many fights tested so far in 25 man there is never a shortage of groups with 3 people where PoH can be used with pretty low levels of overhealing. So we're using the spell you say is the correct answer but if we keep using it, even stacked in spirit gear with all spirit gems and buffs, it's not something we can sustain for very long. That's where the idle time comes from. We have to hold back and fill time with solace or just passive regen to be able to sustain the right answer over a 6 minute encounter.
Those are two different things though, which is why I'm trying to divorce priest mana from the Solace discussion. In a world without a five second rule, you aren't helping your regen at all by going idle. The only reasons to go idle are you don't think anyone needs healing at the moment or you literally don't have enough mana to cast anything. (If you can afford to heal a lot when nobody needs it, then you're just overhealing which mana management is intended to discourage.)

Maybe you could clarify if it is any of these situations:

A) You cast what you feel are appropriate spells and run OOM quickly. You then Shadow Fiend and then ultimately go OOM again (at which point priests with Solace use it to get back in the game).
B) You cast what you feel are appropriate spells but notice that when other healing classes do the same, they end up with far more mana than you.
C) You are so scared to cast anything that you stand around a lot.

As for A/AA, that is a terrible idea... As posted above, Penancing the boss is a trade off. You give up three stacks of Grace for some AoE capabilities to Penance (not likely, but maybe) and three stacks of Evangelism. Making it 1 or 0 stacks makes A/AA even harder to use... If you want us to use A/AA less, because you don't think we are "balanced" around it, either increase the CD to a minute or reduce the bonus to 15%. Else, keep it and let people Penance for stacks... that's just mean thinking of removing that,
We didn't realize the synergistic effects of having Penance provide 3 stacks plus the possibility of instant Holy Fires. All of that means that Evangelism is easier (relative to live) to stack, which means Disc really needs to use Archangel on cooldown to benefit from the healing boost. We prefer when Disc can choose to nuke the target. We don't want it to be mandatory. We could nerf Archangel's healing as an alternative.

While it would be nice if maintaining evangelism was not required, I think disc numbers would have to be brought up substantially. At the moment, AA is offering an average 15% buff to overall healing and is very easy to stack due to penance. You trade off the grace stacks to do this, but it is worth it for the buff. Disc just does not feel viable atm, especially in 25's, and this nerf wouldn't help that feeling a bit.

That's fine, but much as with Solace, we don't want Disc to be balanced around maximizing AA. If we need to nerf those mechanics and buff priests, then that's the right call.

Look at the logs I provided, without ~20% time spend solacing I wouldn't have the mana to be competitive.
I did, but I'm unsure what "competitive" means. Would you be out of mana and couldn't heal while other healers could keep going?

Actually they're saying that by not spending that mana on heal and instead idling/solacing, you set yourself up for larger returns later through using other spells. It doesn't make you regen any faster, but you're able to do more healing in the same window of time, increasing your efficiency. This is why solace feels required. Nerfing solace does nothing to fix the problem with our sustained efficiency, it just brings our burst potential more in line. No one is saying they like spamming solace a ton, it just happens to be the most efficient means for us to heal.
Okay, I think I understand the context. You're saying for a given GCD that generating mana through Solace to afford a more expensive heal is better than spending a GCD on Heal itself, which is slightly mana negative and not awesome throughput. It may be that priests with Solace don't Heal often, and we could live with that.

I disagree with your last bit though. Nerfing Solace does help to fix the problem with sustained efficiency, because it's masking a potential problem.

I think many of you guys are here: I need mana. Solace gives me mana. If you nerf Solace, I won't have mana.

But, I am here: Priests need to be able to function without Solace.

I think now that paladins and monks are hopefully not broken, we'll find that the other healers are closer together. If what several of you are saying is correct (druid > priest / shaman, or even druid > Holy / shaman > Disc) then that will show up pretty quickly.

I guess I have to really ask you a question, how hard is it supposed to be? At BC when I was doing heroic dungeons & kz it was a little challenging (that went away as gear got better). In WoTLK it was a breeze at the start. Cata was almost non-healable at start. So far Mists to me seems harder then BC but easier then Cata. I have not run out of mana doing the dungeons, but I have not hit the heroics yet. I will say I do pride myself on being very mana efficient (ever since the start), I don't cast a flash heal (even now in DS gear) if a heal will do.

The problem I see is if we are expected to stand idle, it is not fun. Doing nothing in a dungeon during a fight is not enjoyable plain and simple. I do think overall mana regen is an issue, if you want the vast majority people completing dungeons and having fun it needs to be higher. If you want what happened in Cata where people thew up their hands in frustration and walked away form healing then keep it as is. It really is a matter of what you want in your game.
Mana management was a little too hard for healers when Cataclysm launched. It felt better by the 4.1 and 4.3 dungeons. We want it to feel better in 5.0 than it did in 4.0, but we want mana to stay relevant longer, while it largely went away for 4.2 and 4.3 raiders.

You should never have to stand idle, so long as you are healing somewhat intelligently. If you are casting a lot of Flash Heals because your group is taking a lot of unnecessary damage then you probably need to change your group strategy. If you are casting a lot of Greater Heals or Prayers of Healing and overhealing, then you need to change your healing strategy. But you should have enough mana for a 3-5 min dungeon boss fight under almost any circumstances. Nearly all of the dungeon wipes I see are because players failed to understand the mechanic (which is often our fault) or failed to execute, not because the healer couldn't keep up.

I don't understand why it couldn't keep its 1.5s cast time and reduce the mana returns instead.
We are going to try Solace at a 1.5 sec cast and 0.7% of mana return.

Don't be too upset. I'm quite happy they nerfed it, now we can see where we are truly at without it mucking the numbers.
Exactly.

Most people using old tier scaled gear I think have been using t12 set bonuses for healing.
We read this a lot, but we're not actually seeing it a lot in the raid testing. Players doing so certainly aren't helping themselves at all, because you won't actually be raiding with the scaled up set bonus of your choice.

If it starts happening a lot, we'll just make those set bonuses not function on beta. We want to balance priests (and all healers) around a baseline case, not a gimmick like an old set bonus or even a mandatory talent.

I know this has nothing to do with Solace/Mana (well not much), but if you're feeling generous, could you please explain the thought behind our 2pc being 10% reduction to Flash Heal, a spell even you said should be used sparingly, when, like, Holy Pally gets 10% to Holy Radiance, a very commonly used spell?
We wanted the set bonus to let priests get more benefit out of Flash Heal, because we thought that would feel cool, because as you point out, it's normally something you can't use often. The paladin benefit is probably more useful, though their 4pc is a single-target heal while it's CoH for Holy. The Flash Heal set bonus could probably safely go up.

We're trying to get away, a little bit, from the design where every tank and every healer have virtual cloned set bonuses. It will make balance more challenging, but will ultimately help keep the game fresher. Set bonuses are one of the few really different things players have to look forward to in gear.

On the subject of mana returns, we're a little concerned about Inner Focus as well. It ends up being a tremendous source of mana for Disc, so much so, that the right behavior is probably to macro it to make sure it gets used on cooldown. We'd rather Inner Focus be a short cooldown with some flexibility (e.g. timing when the boss does a ton of damage) and not a button you have to use every 45 sec (or less with Train of Thought).

To be clear, using a macro to use Inner Focus and Greater Heal with one hotkey is fine. You're making the decision when you want to use Inner Focus. If you're using Inner Focus as soon as it is off cooldown, essentially turning into a passive, then we think it's dumb.

We would buff Disc, possibly through Meditation, if we made a change here.

Don't just remove it and add to Meditation. Do some innovative with it, if you are going to do anything.
We wouldn't remove it. It's a fun ability and we like the thought of Disc maximizing it with Spirit Shell, Divine Aegis PoH or in PvP with the glyph. We just want players to be able to benefit more from the throughput portion of the ability and not just have to use it as a short cooldown Evocate.

Sounds good to me. Will Inner Focus's throughput be buffed at all? It'd be great if the 25% increased critical strike chance was buffed, so that we could choose which heals it would be best to use it on.
We haven't finalized it yet, but we are trying 100% crit chance and 25% mana reduction -- essentially flipping the two values. The risk of overheal with a guaranteed crit would make it optimal not to macro, while not being horrible for anyone who just wants to keep it macro'd.

Thank you, GC. We really do appreciate the dialogue with you, despite letting our frustration getting the better of us sometimes.
Quite honestly, it is far better to have very passionate players than apathetic ones. It's a good thing overall.

When I ask you all to be constructive instead of venting, it's largely a selfish request so that I can efficiently get information I need to do my job better. We also want players to come to these forums for information, which they are more likely to do when the signal to noise ratio is good. Just include signal; that's all we ask.

Out of curiosity, on the average 6 minute fight what are you guys aiming for each of the three healers in a 10m to be putting out in terms of HPS? Are there going to be more fights this expansion where the dps requirements are too strict to allow 3 healers and they have to go dps (like the majority of DS?) Thanks again!
It's really hard to provide those numbers since healers have so much control over whether they are healing for maintenance or going all out. Healers can drive themselves out of mana quickly if they want to, but provide huge healing as a trade off. Often, it changes depending on what part of the fight you're in. We think having that degree of control is the fun part of the healer resource system. It's also why it is so challenging to tune longevity of healing specs compared to the throughput of DPS specs. As with PvP, we rely a lot on player testing and feedback for how healing feels, since it's hard for us to recreate healing or PvP environments. Harkening back to my oceanography roots, you have controlled laboratory experiments vs. field collection and sampling. Healing and PvP are hard to test well in the lab.

We definitely don't like forcing situations where healers get dropped for DPS. On the other hand, DPS checks are a good way to ensure that the encounters aren't balanced solely around the skill of the tanks and healers alone, and they can be fun for DPS as well. It's a sticky challenge (and again I don't mean to derail).

Is there any concern that with buffing Meditation to 50% for disc, on top of Rapture, that Disc mana regen will begin to outpace Holy's?

It's entirely possible, but from what I know, disc tends to have to spend more than holy does. I could be wrong of course, but disc regen is usually rather high, just spending a whole lot too.
We gave Disc a lower Meditation for this reason, but so far in actual player testing it's not bearing out, so we wanted to err on the side of being generous with mana. If further testing suggests that Disc now has much stronger regen or longevity than Holy, we can adjust further.

They're right. Solace is hitting unusually hard. I took smite and holy fire off my bars because they are no longer necessary. Might want to tune the damage down on this ability.
Good catch. We neglected to lower its damage when we cut the cast time back down. Easy fix. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Recent Shadow Priest ChangesI really just don't understand what you all are doing with us, and it sure as hell seems like you have no idea either. You want a tip? Stop taking advice from the 1,000,000 casuals that probably don't even theorycraft on beta and get some direct input from players that actually know how to play the spec and see how they feel about the changes.
You might have missed the post where I said class designers are required to take a drink every time we read “the devs don’t know what we’re doing with the class.” It’s hard to tune things when we take too many drinks, so please keep that in mind.

We do take feedback from experienced, intelligent players very seriously. It’s awkward for us to state outright in threads “Yeah, dude, I read your feedback, but you obviously have no idea what you’re talking about, so we’re doing to discount it.” On the other hand, there are brilliant theorycrafters who never step foot in raids, as hard as that might be to believe, and there are plenty of very hardcore raiders who are terrible armchair designers. Ultimately, one of the Blizzard core values is “every voice matters,” and we try to practice it here. Your words will convince us more than your deeds anyway. Stick to the strength of your arguments, not the awesomeness of your achievements.

We are a dot class, and our dots are our worst abilities.
I believe SW:Pain and VT do about 25% of Shadow’s damage, which seems fine for a dot class. Your dots don’t need to be your highest damage button in order to be a dot class, and in fact when they are, that leads to ignoring everything but the dots. Multi-dotting is cool, but we're not thrilled with the gameplay that is just dot everything in the room and ignore Mind Blast and Mind Flay. Dotting only is fine for large groups of weak mobs, but in a more traditional multi-dot situation, we want the dot juggling to be layered on top of the nukes, not to the exclusion of them.

Shadow does very well on Will of the Emperor, which is pretty much the best case scenario for multi-dotting. Yes, Affliction does even more dot damage, but that’s partially because Affliction has 3 dots. I’m not sure it’s a requirement for Shadow to do as much dotting as Affliction in order to be a fun spec and still feel like a dot class (and keeping up 3 dots on multiple targets can be harder than 2).

Overall, we do want specs like Shadow, Affliction and Balance to do well when multi-dotting is possible. What we don’t want is for those specs to dominate in multi-dot situations and be at the bottom on every other fight. We just can’t guarantee that every raid tier will have an equal number of single-target to multi-target fights, and unlike say a warlock, the Shadow priest doesn’t even have the option to respec to a different DPS spec to meet the needs of the encounter. All we’re trying to do is bring the extremes closer together.

We have no burst CD. Our burst CD is save orbs and lose overall damage.
I think this is a valid concern. Power Infusion is available as a talent, but there is still some pressure to use it on another character. On the other hand, it’s not absolutely essential that every single spec have the same spells. That's the sort of thing that leads to class homogenization. We’ll consider some options here.

Our damage relative to other classes is low, this really can't be argued with.
I’ll argue with it. Slyck was the only one to try and post numbers in this thread, and those logs show Shadow doing well on Will of the Emperor and less well on Grand Empress. But there is also a mage and a warrior down there with the priest, and you would have to dig into these logs more thoroughly anyway, since Grand Empress puts debuffs on casters than can cause them to go stand in the corner for periods of time. I’m not sure what the argument is with the Feng parse. The priest seem to be in the pack with many other classes. Slyck’s argument is that their damage barely goes up in execute range, but it does go up, and seems to mirror that of the warriors, who have a great execute.

Also keep in mind, many buffs and nerfs have gone out since these parses were made (partially as a response to all of the raid parses we got). We’re going to be doing some more raid tests this week, so we’ll get more data. Please keep an eye on it.

But don't rage over this ^ SW:Insanity is supposed to be a baseline ability for Shadow.
I can’t tell if this was intended to be sarcasm or not, but Insanity is what happens when you choose the Solace talent and go Shadowform.

Item - Priest T14 Shadow 4P Bonus now also increases the damage done by Shadow Word: Insanity by 15%. How in the world does that make sense, work with your desire for Mists of Pandaria nor even not come across as hypocritical?
The original set bonus change is essentially a nerf to the Insanity talent, so the change we made was just to keep it breaking even. We don’t consider, and haven’t seen any evidence, that Insanity is a mandatory talent. Surge of Darkness and Mindbender should provide similar DPS over the course of a fight. Insanity is probably the most complex of the talents do to the consuming mechanic, so we definitely don’t want it to be mandatory. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Poll: Favorite Mists of Pandaria Beta Zone

Originally Posted by Blizzard
(Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

You’ve tested, you’ve explored, and you’ve done a great job sharing feedback. Now let’s sit back, take a breather for a moment, and chat about the beautiful zones in Pandaria. There are seven primary new locations to adventure in, and we want to know which one has been your favorite and why.

Blizzard Games News
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